In Homeric vocabularies by William Bishop Owen and Edgar Johnson Goodspeed the authors list words by the frequency they occur in the Illiad and the Odyssey; so that you have a list of words emphasizing which ones are used the most, or which ones are more important to memorize. Is there such a list available on-line?

The Owen and Goodspeed book is very handy, and small enough to be slipped in your pocket and carried around. But the Perseus (.org) website has a feature that allows you to form your own vocabulary lists, from any author or book or chapter, with great flexibility. You can fashion your own criteria, and decide how many words to list (ie. top 10%, 20%....100%). Perseus offers other tools too: commentaries, dictionaries, and grammars. But the core of the site is a library of Greek literature that can be electronically searched, and in which each word is hyperlinked to a definition, grammatical information, and endless textual statistics. Personally, I prefer reading and handling books, but Perseus is a great resource for identifying (or narrowing down) unusual forms. Sometimes, and especially with Homer, the hyperlinked information seems unable to positively identify a form, but it is often helpful and always free. I am also excited and grateful to have found this forum of interesting and motivated people!

Out of curiosity, is there a lexicon of homeric vocabulary per book for the the Illiad and the Odyssey? Something like "here is all of the vocabulary in book 1 of the Illiad" with the vocabulary list for the book 2 being the *new* vocabulary with respect to the book 1 and so on?

psilord wrote:Out of curiosity, is there a lexicon of homeric vocabulary per book for the the Illiad and the Odyssey? Something like "here is all of the vocabulary in book 1 of the Illiad" with the vocabulary list for the book 2 being the *new* vocabulary with respect to the book 1 and so on?

Interesting. It seems like a reasonable thing to have and prevents you from constantly looking through large dictionaries for a word when you can have a small dictionary for the words in the book you are reading. I suppose at the back of the dictionary you can have all words in alphabetical order with what book they came first in so you can look them up if you are totally lost. I actually spend the time to memorize all of the words in each Pharr lesson, and if I could do this per book, I would.

psilord wrote:Interesting. It seems like a reasonable thing to have and prevents you from constantly looking through large dictionaries for a word when you can have a small dictionary for the words in the book you are reading.

Well, now, this is different. If you download the Minckwitz Odyssey 12 reader, the full vocabulary of that is at the end of the book.

But this progressive accumulation scheme you present would be difficult. Beginner's books do not typically start on line 1 and go through to the end, especially for the Epics which are, well, epic in scope. You get selections, and the Minckwitz book - which dumps you down into the middle, in book 12 - was designed to be a first reader after your year of grammar.

The Pharr A group is almost done. Perhaps those who are progressing to Iliad B might record each time they have to look up something in a lexicon, and from that someone could compile a list of words/forms in the order they appear in Iliad B which a graduate of Pharr may need explained to them.

EDIT : Upon the completion of Pharr A, will there, be another session with Minckwitz's Odyssey M, or even a session with Iliad B?

I think psilord's suggestion is very interesting. Perhaps the Perseus vocabulary tool could be changed slightly to allow for such a progressive word list. You could compile "Vocabulary for Iliad 2" minus "Vocabulary for Iliad 1"; or "Vocabulary for Iliad 3" minus "Vocabulary for Iliad 1 and 2". It wouldn't even have to be in book order, or even within the same author. For instance, if somebody wanted to read Odyssey 12 after finishing Iliad 1, they could compile a list of "Vocabulary for Odyssey 12" minus "Vocabulary for Iliad 1". Or even, "Vocabulary for Plato's Apology" minus "Vocabulary for Iliad 1" (I'm not sure this would be extremely useful, but it wouldn't require a more complicated system). But I know nothing about computer programming, so perhaps there is a good reason why this can't be done?

I suppose you could print separate vocabulary lists for Book 1 and Book 2 in alphabetical order, and compare them physically, marking the new words in Book 2, and then make flashcards or something. But this would be time consuming even for Book 2, and would probably be ridiculous to continue any further in that manner.

You could print off a vocabulary list from Perseus for whatever book you are reading, in alphabetical order, and it would be a small dictionary for the book you are reading. This would work great if you just want a list to consult, rather than a list of new words to memorize.

If I were to actually do this, I'd figure out the markup of perseus, write some perl, and datamine the information I needed right out of the text on the web pages. I've seriously thought about it since I appear to be pretty proficient at simply memorizing large vocabulary lists. I would just want the lists I memorize to be context specific to what I happen to be reading.